Bog Myrtle & Peat

I didn’t want to start a blog. Back in 2009, I thought that writing online was a poor equivalent to the prestige of print, and it seems laughable now that many of my first pitches to magazines were sent out as hard copies by post. I was already out of date in this, and I can only imagine how editors must have sniggered at my neatly labelled samples and hand-written envelopes. I was lucky that one or two of them took me seriously, but starting a blog felt like a real departure from Plan A. I don’t remember why I made the leap, but I’m very glad I did.

Blogging is a great way to motivate your writing and develop or improve useful contacts. I really enjoy spending time producing Bog Myrtle and Peat, but it’s strictly a hobby (or occasionally a loss-leader) for me. It exists because I’m not that interested in watching television. My “real” paid writing goes elsewhere, and there’s a very clear line in my head between work and play. 

Even in the time I’ve known this format, great strides have been made to monetise blog platforms as marketing tools. The effect has been transformational, and most blogs are now designed by “content creators” to maximise their reach across multiple social media platforms. Blogging has become a mixture of work and science, optimised to appeal to robotic search engine algorithms. That’s created a whole new style of writing based on keywords and how the reader scrolls through the text. 

Modern blogs are a shop-window for businesses seeking to stamp their expertise on focussed issues; “if you want to adjust the gears on your bicycle, read this blog for the latest advice and tips – and if you need a set of Allen keys, click here!” I used to work for a company which required me to speak in these terms, and it’s ironic that content designed to be approachable and humane is often created in pursuit of an algorithmic treadmill. 

Writing blogs to market products or services is a slog. It’s an uninteresting game you play against a checklist of do’s and don’ts, and the subject matter is largely incidental. You learn to write in much the same way, regardless of whether you’re trying to sell organic milk or tickets to Silverstone, so it’s not surprising that tools have been invented to take a load off. In the screenshot above, this blog writing tool starts with the assumptive question “hate writing blog articles?” It expects the reader to emit a sigh of confirmatory relief – “oh my god, yes!” 

I’m not making any criticism of marketing blogs here. I would be a hypocrite if I did, and in reality, I’m the fool for persisting with an outdated idea of what a blog should be. Even as I write this, WordPress (this blog’s host) is dividing my paragraphs into blocks and steering me towards generating content that is easily digestible and aesthetically pleasing. I find it’s actually quite hard to make this blog look as ugly as I’d like it to. And to be clear on this point, anything which takes Bog Myrtle and Peat away from being handwritten in biro on lined A4 paper with a tatter of perforations up one side represents a deviation from my vision. 

In the same way, when the time comes to publish a blog article here, I have to make a slow and laborious effort to ensure that it’s not automatically promoted on social media. Promoting stuff on social media is all very well, but publicity and writing are two different skillsets. I produce this blog because I want to write, and that’s how I justify the hours spent here at evenings and weekends away from work. There was a time when I promoted this blog on social media in the hope that others would read and share my stuff, but that’s a slippery slope and I soon found I was doing more promotion than writing. That’s just exhausting, particularly when you realise that a great deal of promotion depends upon the transactional expectation that if you want people to share your stuff, you have to read and share theirs. 

This reflects one of a few lessons I’ve learned about writing, namely that the world is full of a thousand reasons not to write – the most insidious of these are activities which imply that they are part of writing; activities like teaching writing, meeting writers, attending writing courses or buying stationary. I love all of these things – but in reality, only actually writing is writing. 

Again, I’m out on a limb here. WordPress simply cannot believe that I don’t want my hard work to be automatically shared on Facebook, and I have to uncheck a number of boxes which assume that promotion comes as standard. I don’t put paragraph breaks in the most algorithmically sound locations, and when my search engine optimisation scores are published, I usually flunk the analysis. 

It’s only recently that I’ve begun to sometimes doubt myself on taking this line. I happened to hear the biography of a dramatist on the radio; a man who only ever took the purest path to his creativity, turning down a number of high profile sponsors for fear they would ask him to deviate from his line. When he died, one of his collaborators celebrated that sense of single-mindedness, but measured it against the opportunities he might have been offered to develop his craft if he had been willing to compromise. Each one of the dear-departed’s works had been crystal-clear in isolation, but how much greater the sum of his career if he’d only been more open. It’s telling that even as I wrack my brains to remember the name of this idealistic creator, it completely escapes me. And it bugs me to wonder how far might I be able to go with my writing if only I wasn’t so determined to please myself alone.

I’m only thinking aloud in this. Blogs would not be recognised as a valuable marketing tool if they did not work as such. So perhaps the message here is only that I recoiled from starting a blog because I wanted to write in print. More than a decade later, I now write both online and in magazines – but only through a concerted effort to stay focussed on what I want from blogging, even where that’s forced me to be downright pig-headed.

Image: screenshot from Facebook ad for “Jasper”